Secular Café: How much are people motivated by huge salaries?

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How much are people motivated by huge salaries? May 10th 2012, 15:02 And what is the effect on their performance? It turns out to be fairly complex, and perhaps we should expect that. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012...ut-the-money/1 Quote: "People have three psychological needs – to feel autonomous, to feel competent and to feel related to others," he says. Payment, according to Deci's research, does not fulfill these needs. Over-emphasis on financial reward undermines autonomy and therefore intrinsic motivation, he says. "This [negative effect of money on motivation] matters hugely. You need high quality performance from bankers. You need thinkers, problem solvers, people who can be creative and using money to motivate them will not get you that." Perhaps more surprisingly some economists also question how good money is as a motivator. Dan Ariely, of Duke University, North Carolina, in the US, provides a compelling example. "If I ask you to help me change a tire on my car you might be willing to help, but if I offer you a dollar for this you don't say to yourself 'gee I get to help Dan and I get a dollar'. In contrast you say: 'It's a dollar, I don't work for a dollar' and you're less interested in doing this." In other words the introduction of financial incentives into a relationship by one party can undermine another's motivation to perform a task. But maybe the small sums involved in Ariely's example and Deci's experiments undermine their application to real-world international business and finance. To address this, Ariely and colleagues, recruited villagers in India to play games testing memory, creativity and motor skills, offering three different groups four, 40 or 400 rupees per game for scoring highly. The maximum reward was equivalent to the amount spent by the average person living in rural India in five months. They found that those offered the highest incentives performed worst, earning an average of 20% of the maximum possible, compared to around 36% for those in the low and medium reward groups. "Our results challenge the assumption that an increase in motivation would necessarily lead to improvements in performance," says Ariely... ...This concept of failure to perform under pressure, or "choking", is well known in sport. A famous example saw French golfer Jean Van de Velde needing to sink the ball in six shots on the last hole of the final round of the 1999 British Open to win. Having done so in just three shots in the two previous rounds, he crumbled under pressure and took seven shots, before losing the resulting play off. A key problem that has faced those in this field in the past has been the difficulty of measuring motivation using psychological tests and questionnaires. But the increasing use of brain imaging technologies in neuroscience has provided a new and more direct method to study thoughts and feelings. These techniques are now being adopted to tease apart the different aspects of motivation.

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